This article is about young women, college and sex. But I refuse to start with a vignette about college coeds hooking up in a frat. Or about a late-night booty text. Or about a sad senior, sitting in her dorm, reflecting on her previous four years and wondering why she did not find the love of her life, or at least a steady, if mediocre, boyfriend.

That’s the kind of intro you find in most stories about college sex life — and those stories are everywhere. Feature stories in magazines, multipage spreads in newspapers and posts on feminist blogs would have you believe that, first, only white, straight, Ivy League girls are getting laid because they’re the only ones ever quoted in these articles, and second, these girls have replaced relationships with casual sex … and it’s an epidemic.

I’m straight, white and female and have just graduated from an Ivy League school, so these trend pieces are supposedly about me. But they don’t ring true. After a year of reading them, I am exhausted by the media’s obsession with the “hookup culture.” Why, besides the obvious reasons, is this topic so irresistible? Lisa Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College who has done extensive research on the subject, explains, “The media is talking about it because we love moral panic.”

As it turns out, there’s not all that much to panic about. If you look at the data, this Ivy League hookup culture exists for only a tiny percentage of college kids. What’s more, the sex lives of most of today’s college students may not be all that different from those of their parents or grandparents at the same age.

So let’s look at the three biggest misconceptions about college kids and sex:

1. College students are choosing random hookups over meaningful relationships.

Well, it depends on how you define a hookup, but in general rampant casual sex is not the norm, despite what the media is saying. Stories about the college hookup culture are so ubiquitous that a recent story in the New York Times made this sweeping statement:

It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by “hooking up” — an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to oral sex to intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship.

But according to the survey quoted in that same Times article, 20% of female students and 25% of male students have “hooked up” with 10 or more people. That sounds like a lot. But wait — 10 or more people over the course of four years in college? That’s only two to three partners per year. Moreover, the definition of hookup spanned from kissing to intercourse. Of those women and men who had hooked up with 10 or more people, only 40% of those instances involved sex.

Crunching the numbers, that means that only 8% of college women who responded to this survey had sex with 10 or more men who they were not dating over the course of four years.

Yes, dance floor make-outs (fondly dubbed DFMOs) and casual sex do happen on campuses. But the hookup culture is far from standard practice. Thanks to all the media hype, students themselves vastly overestimate how much hooking up is going on at their school. A study at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln found that 90% of college students thought their peers were hooking up two or more times per school year, when in reality only 37% of students reported doing so.

2. Most Ivy League girls are too busy and ambitious for relationships.

Nearly every article about hookup culture I’ve read this year has surrounded the Ivies. Hanna Rosin asserted in the Atlantic that the demands of the modern world have left women at these elite institutions with no time for boyfriends, so they are opting out of relationships and into hookups.

One of the girls Rosin interviewed, Raisa Bruner (called by the pseudonym Tali in the article), who graduated from Yale with me in May, was dissatisfied with the conclusions of Rosin’s piece and decided to find out if Yalies were really dismissing relationships for hookups. She wrote in the Yale Daily News:

In a survey I conducted of over 100 Yale students, almost all of the single respondents, ambition be damned, said they were currently seeking a relationship involving dating, commitment or, at the very least, monogamous sex.

I know a number of very successful women — women who are now students at top med schools, analysts at the State Department or Rhodes scholars — who found the time while at Yale to maintain serious relationships with equally as busy boys (or girls). I know many other women who left Yale wishing they had had a relationship in college.

And while I can’t say the sex lives of Yalies represents all college students or even those in the Ivy League, the data from the school about sex is a good reality check. In 2010, the Yale Daily News conducted a sex survey on campus and found that only 64.3% of students had had sexual intercourse over the course of their Yale career. The median Yale student had had only two sexual partners by the time he or she graduated. Promiscuity is not the norm. Not even for men (whom we never hear from in these articles for some reason): 30.5% of Yale men had never had intercourse. Plenty of students are forgoing sex entirely, limiting their sexual partners or engaging in exclusive relationships.

3. The so-called hookup generation represents a radical break from the past.

While everyone’s decrying the end of traditional sexual relationships, it might be worthwhile to take a look at what sex and relationships looked like before this “hookup boom.”

A 1967 study by the Institute for Sex Research consisting of 1,177 undergraduate students from 12 colleges found that 68% of the men and 44% of the women reported having engaged in premarital sex. Not “hookups.” Sex. Compare that with Yale’s current 64.3%. In another study, researchers at Western State University interviewed 92 male students and 113 female students annually from 1969 to 1972 and found that during their freshman year, 46% of the men and 51% of the women reported having had premarital sex. By senior year, the figures were 82% for men and 85% for women.

True, we don’t have cold, hard data from that era about how many people these students were having sex with. “But there’s always been casual sex on college campuses,” says Wade. “That’s been true since before women were there.” And that’s to say nothing of make-out sessions, a hookup staple these days.

Some things havechanged with technology. Booty calls are simpler: texting or g-chatting or Facebook messaging a boy to come over for casual sex is a lot easier — and probably a lot less awkward — than calling that boy on a landline to request the same. It’s quick, it’s impersonal, it’s easy.

But what’s really changed dramatically is not what women want or how much sex they’re having; that’s about the same. It’s the amount that we talk about sex and the way we talk about it. Whether it’s Lena Dunham stripping on HBO, students debating whether hookups are sexist or feminist in college newspapers, or magazine writers coming up with trend pieces about society’s moral decline, we are making a topic that was conversationally taboo a few decades ago central to our concerns about the moral decline of the nation.

It’s not a new trend. It’s just a new conversation.

Eliana Dockterman is a recent graduate of Yale University and a reporter for TIME. The views expressed are solely her own.

It's interesting that you keep referring to the Ivy League when, let's face it, that's a minority of college students. Do I think that the college hookup culture is as bad as the media portrays it? No. But let's just say it wasn't uncommon for me to find condoms in the bushes on the way to class. People hook up. People have sex. What's so wrong with that? Maybe not everyone is ready for a serious, long-term relationship when they're in college, and there's nothing wrong with that:

It isn’t news that today’s sexual behavior is close to what
was happening in the late 60’s. The Pill, and the sexual revolution that went
with it, had been around for years already. However, the comparison does offer
a good look at the result of the continued “hook-up” culture: since the 60s,
marriage has declined by a 1/3 and divorce has doubled. For students who are
looking for a permanent relationship, there’s an old saying: “Why buy the cow
when you’re getting the milk for free?” For
many men, there’s little incentive for a man to marry a woman when she’s
already having sex with him.

If you went to an Ivy league school then you should know that the word "media" is plural and not singular. It is the plural of medium. TV, radio, newspapers are each a medium. Together they are the media.

Here's yet another "story" designed to keep us from focusing on the real problems facing the American people.

College kids like sex. They are just discovering their bodies and have fun with each other. So what? College students in every generation have liked sex and out of touch oldsters have been complaining about it for centuries.

Ah wow... How do the so-called sexual "realities" at an Ivy League school have anything to do with sexual habits of all U.S. college students in general. Please tell me Eliana understands the true meaning of a "party school." Tell your friend to take her super-scientific 100-person polls there and see what kind of results she gets.

This narrow-minded article carries all the symptoms of mother-in-law syndrome.

Hmm. I think you are looking at this from your own narrow view. I am a college student that attends a private Catholic University and I often visit my friends at their Universities such as UB, R.I.T, U ofookup R, Fischer, UCF, UF and many more and I can tell you that the hookup culture is very real and noticed it way before the media started talking about it. Times have changed and now that women aren't attending college merely to find a husband and settle down are more inclined to a hookups or FWB. We are all human and have the urge to have sex, but we now want to do it without making any commitments and to focus on our studies. It is the best of both worlds. I'm not saying that everyone engages in it or that it doesn't get messy from time to time with people developing attachments, but it is becoming more frequent and more acceptable.

There has always been plenty of sex to go around! Go talk to your Grandmother about how things went before WW2, or your mom about how many partners she actually had??? Has the attitude about having sex, and talking about sex changed... yes! Are girls as worried about having sex in this abortion rich and easy culture...NO! But from my side of the aisle (the Guy) I think its a big scam that someone sold women... I mean now you can get casual oral sex, as a substitute for "real sex" from a casual partner???? Or a girl who likes you will send a topless pic or more on her smart phone, just for the fun of it??? Or a girl you hardly know might just "make out with you on the dance floor" All the way to third base, (showing my age here) and then never even become a real friend??? It may not be as bad as the mags say, but the fact that we hear it at all, says a lot about how things about sex have changed. I mean your Grandmother never did those things casually, even though she probably had sex before she got married! But I guess these dudes today just have it a little better than we old timers did. But I'm not sure thats a good thing???

I don't get the point of the article. Is the author trying to say the "hookup culture" doesn't exist because she wasn't part of it? Seems to me I know the Goth culture exists, but I'm not part of that. She seems to want to paint the world through her own narrow perspective by writing about something in which she didn't necessarily participate. Or did she? What does "hook-up" REALLY mean in today's techy world?

She's talking about intercourse in ALL of her citations - who's a virgin and who isn't. Hook-ups aren't necessarily "intercourse". A BJ or HJ IS sex, but they aren't intercourse. Sexting is masturbation material - no intercourse. No touching, either. Sex chat - same as sexting.

It's ALL SEX and with the ubiquitous nature of tech today, it's happening a hell of a lot more than the numbers she provided could possibly indicate. Yeah, maybe someone only averages one or two REAL stick-it-in, "virgin no more", intercourse partners in a four year college experience. But you can bet that's not the only time they got their rocks off. Kids don't see BJ's and HJ's and DFMO's and sexting as SEX - especially the kind of sex the bible thumpers seem to have the biggest issues with. So naturally, her numbers are reflective of a reality that didn't exist when those studies were done.

Speaking of citations, her personal experiences don't a statistical universe make. Her "I know many women..." quote is an example of living in a shell that doesn't include the universe about which one is writing. She was never part of the "hook-up" culture. I could try writing about the Goth culture with similar effect. I know a lot of people who don't do Goth. Practically everyone I know, in fact. But the fact is that Goth is big in many circles. The author seems to think she didn't run with the "hook-up" culture because she didn't see a lot of people spreading their legs. But they had cell phones for phone sex, sexting and sex chat.

Care to take bets she never thought of those as sex?

Goth and vampires and werewolves are all big things these days (Personally, I'm sick to death of them). Zombies and Steampunk seem to be waiting in the wings for their go at pop culture. Hook-ups are what kids do today - but the author fails to see the whole picture. Is sex more prevalent? Damn straight it is. You couldn't text someone with a sexual message to get them off fifteen years ago the way you can today. You couldn't snap a picture of your privates and send it to someone else to enjoy in a sexual way the way you can today. Promiscuity is in the eye of the beholder. Sex doesn't necessarily mean touching - at least in some circles. The availability of a sexual (of some kind) encounter is rampant today - thanks to technology. No condoms. No need to worry about VD or pregnancy. But you can bet people are getting off a lot more today than they were back in the day simply because we have the technology today to do more things sexually with another person than we had then. Maybe the actual act of vaginal penetrating sex isn't any greater than it was back in the day.

But you can bet a lot more chickens are getting choked (male and female), thanks to a form of personal interaction that didn't exist in the 1980's, than ever before.

THAT'S the "hook-up" culture today. I guess she didn't get that memo...

Oh GOD FORBID we have a "hookup" culture and young attractive college kids actually have fun having sex. No we should stay old and stodgy and subscribe to Victorian era ideals that brought us such wonderful cultural traits as repressed sexual dysfunction and a 50% divorce rate.

The summer of love was 45, yes 45 years ago, yet people are still scandalized by the sex lives of young people. I think that's the real story. Not weather twenty-somethings are or aren't did or didn't have meaningless, no strings attached sex, forty-somethings wished they still had the possibility of having.

Society has always loved to obsess about how much sex young people are having, and always grossly overestimated it.

Estimating how much sex young people have based on "hookup culture" articles is like estimating how much sex adult women have based on Sex And The City. I suppose people find both titillating, but they have only a vague similiarity to reality, and even there only with a tiny minority.

Looking for a meaningful relationship while at college is like looking for a meaningful relationship at a bar - all you get is hooked up and knocked up. I'm supposed to be surprised that more and more women in college graduate with a sprog instead of a sheepskin? What a joke.

Wow is this really newsworthy, I graduated college in 1988. It was a coastal community where I worked as a bartender and surf-lifeguard in the summer. I (and some of my co-workers) had sex with different women every couple of weeks in our summer job and sometimes 2 or more a week for stretches of time. This was not counting campus encounters or bar encounters. Most of the women I had sex with attended the same college. I never counted, but I would say over 4 years well over 100 women. I have been married for 17 years and have 3 children and live a normal life. I keep in contact with a lot of my college friends who also are living normal productive lives. So I guess what I am trying to say is who cares, college is a time of discovery and experimentation, the first time you have your "own place" without your parents around so you are bound to let loose on some level. As far as the "Ivy League" component, are these students of a higher moral compass that they cannot conceive of such a hookup culture living in their rarified air. To me the only difference I found with "Ivy League" students is their parents had more money and connections with big business, that was about it. I studied abroad at Oxford University my junior year with a fair amount of Harvard and Yale students, and never felt intellectually challenged. Also, some of the ivy league women I had sex with there appeared to be lily white on the outside, but get a few half pints in them and back to your room and holy cow, I wasn't expecting that! If you want to be around really smart people, go to MIT. I picked up a girl from there at Oxford and when we had sex she refused to take off her bra and panties, I was only allowed to move things around. Very weird girl, very smart girl, and heck it was still fun anyway.

"What’s more, the sex lives of most of today’s college students may not be all that different from those of their parents or grandparents at the same age."

And:

"Crunching the numbers, that means that only 8% of college women who responded to this survey had sex with 10 or more men who they were not dating over the course of four years.

And:"True, we don’t have cold, hard data from that era about how many people these students were having sex with. “But there’s always been casual sex on college campuses,” says Dr. Wade. “

BUT.... we DO have hard data from "that era" that is close enough to make a comparison. The Kinsey Institute has been doing these sorts of surveys for more than 60 years now.

So here we have a study that shows some 8% of Ivy League women have more than 10 sexual partners over a 4 year period. The Kinsey surveys show that across the entire spectrum of women, only 9% of women have more than 10 sexual partners *during their entire lifetime*. You've managed to find a group that racks that number up in just 4 years.... Yeah, I'd call that different.

@Janette I think you are projecting. Between your post and Eliana's article, the person who seems the most hostile is you. I cant see ANYTHING hostile about her article. But accusing someone of being hostile when they aren't, such as you are doing, is a somewhat hostile act. Try working on that.

@chris1jt ALL normal college kids like sex. There's nothing wrong with sex, at Yale or at South Dakota State College. Kids like sex at both places and many of them everywhere will experiment with different sexual partners. So what?

Oldsters have been complaining about sex on campus for centuries. Why not focus on a real problem, such as the increasing concentration of real wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the decline of the middle class, the continuing problems of Americans with disabilities, our militaristic posturing all over the world, and the other problems we prefer to ignore? Oh, I forgot, the powers that be don't want us to focus on real issues.

@Bhhutch88 It's a good thing to demystify sex. which is a natural body function. Sex to have fun is perfectly natural because, after all, sex is lots of fun for most people. Mature people having sex often seek deeper relationships and that too is good. There's no right or wrong way to approach sex or life. It's all what you like and what works for you. Don't be preachy since you don't have any idea what is right or wrong for another person.

@Bhhutch88 It is a good thing, a very good thing. While the risk of STDs is of course rather real, if you want to have all variety of sex, it's pretty much open season. Of course I went to NYU, not Yale, so I'm assuming people having sex in the Ivy League is more newsworthy. It being a weird combination George Bush-types and geeky gunners, after all. The amount of sex people were having at NYU was... well I'm from the midwest, and I found it (ahem) exciting.

All in all, a culture where the church has been defanged and both women and men feel free to explore life and enjoy it, is good stuff.

No, you're just buying into the media "moral panic". College students today have the same definitions of sex, cheating, and everything else as people had 40 years ago too.

The author cited a number of reasonably reliable statistics to make their point. You've just made a bunch of unfounded conjecture about an age group you clearly aren't a part of.

Sure, people can send sexual messages to each other easily. On the other hand, sending images to someone you don't trust is a great way to have them sent all over the place and posted on the internet forever. Hence, it's only a very small % of people who would consider doing something like that outside of an existing sexual relationship.

@Lego.my.eggo@Lego.my.eggo This is ridiculously judgmental and wrongfully so. Who are you to say these things about Ivy League girls? Engaging in ad hominem, about someone you don't know at all for that matter, is a low blow, and this is a terrible attempt at it. Please take your tastelessness somewhere else.

OK...never mind...not even going to bother feeding you, you moronic troll. Literally not a thing you said here makes sense, has any semblance of grounding in reality, is constructive, and was not hypocitical (how does it feel on that soap box of yours, criticizing the author for discussing a valid and constructive social issue, acting superior while criticizing your perception that she was such?)

@mattrdesign So being 'privilege' should be a form of 'disprivilege', and the only people whose opinions are worth taking seriously are those without any privilege at all? That's a very small set of people indeed.

@mattrdesign Except that the article was talking about hookup culture in ivy league schools. Kinda helps to have that opinion coming from someone who was there. Maybe you should read more than the first line if you want your opinion of the article taken seriously?

@DavidP747 you put Wilt Chamberlain to shame. Two different girls a month over a 4 year period you have sex with( you said well over 100 in 4 years)...and the ones from last month just fade away? You studied abroad at Oxford but were not challenged and the "lilly white" were vixens. ARe you sure you aren't the "Most INteresting Man in the World" like the booze ad...I think you have condensed every movie you have ever seen into your life. Did you participate in the Olympic decathalon and the Iron Man triathlon. I assume this is a joke

@JimR978The only problem is, the author manufactured the 8% figure. The statistics she quoted were:

'But according to the survey quoted in that same Times article,
20% of female students and 25% of male students have “hooked up” with
10 or more people. That sounds like a lot. But wait — 10 or more people
over the course of four years in college? That’s only two to three
partners per year. Moreover, the definition of hookup spanned
from kissing to intercourse. Of those women and men who had hooked up
with 10 or more people, only 40% of those instances involved sex.

Crunching the numbers, that means that only 8% of college women who
responded to this survey had sex with 10 or more men who they were not
dating over the course of four years.'

20% of the female students either kissed or had sex with 10 or more people. She then multiplied that by the 40% had sex figure. It could have been that all 20% of the female students all had sex, or all had no sex, or some figure in between. Thus, the 8% figure is not a fact representative of the study.

So sweet of you to go defending this article. Open up your mind. Majority of Americans don't relate to this article nor care about it especially when you put the label "ivy league" on it. If she were to have said "college students" in general, then maybe that would be newsworthy.

@olderbutwiser@DavidP747 Its actually only about 25 per year average, which is not that many, I worked with guys that easily outdid me. Summer was always an extra active time of the year, so its not a simple division problem as you state in your response. And no, I did not participate in any olympic sports or iron man triathlon's. Regarding your comment, " the the ones last month just fade away"..At the beach, most people rent vacation homes for a week, so yes you are somewhat correct, you were always guaranteed a fresh batch every week and it was every lifeguards job to invite as many girls as possible to parties we would host throughout the week. This pattern continued until Labor Day, I am sure you can figure out the rest.

@MarcoSalazar@JimR978 I don't see how you could have possibly gotten that from my post Marco. I very cleared separated "Ivy League women" and "women across the entire spectrum" as two distinct sets. So I guess the question here is did *you* read my response? Or did you just read what you wanted to read?

@Lego.my.eggo@greyngold Lego, yes your post is more coherent, but it's also mostly inaccurate, rude and a little shallow. I don't think it would make any sense that she was molested as a child and someone who is happy could have wrote this. Usually when someone scoffs at people presenting their vulnerabilities through honest accounts it usually means they're regularly suppressing their own feelings because they're scared of what they might uncovered (i.e. your a homosexual)

@olderbutwiser@DavidP747 I have no reason to make this up, Wilt did because he needed the money. Not sure what team you played for, but I would not rate the Cape as good hunting because its basically a family destination. No doubt, playing in the league should net you some patch though. As far as myself, on top of the size of my university (25,000 students), my "professions" as lifeguard and bartender, they no doubt enhanced my options greatly. Throw in over 25 different bars and nightclubs in the area to boot. Everyone in the bar profession knew each other as we all frequented each others establishments, so we often had options in those bars as well. I also never waited in line or paid for a drink in any of the bars I visited when I tended bar.

@DavidP747@olderbutwiser this is amazing. I played in the Cape Cod baseball league for a summer and we were shocked that the real "studs" would maybe have 3 or 4 girls over a 12 week period plus a girlfriend back home. You say you doubled that every summer..and then kept going through girls 2 per month during school when they could not fade away. Since I was also at the shore in a seemingly advantageous position I did not see that but that was the late 70's so maybe things have changed.